This has been a strange week.
First of all, I had the pleasure to speak at re:publica in Berlin, perhaps the most political of all web conferences. The gathering, now in its 5th year, has evolved from a forum on digital governance to a somewhat unique and truly German hybrid of deep philosophical discourse (about the role of the individual in the digital space) and hands-on advice for practitioners. It felt a little bit like going back to college while working in a start-up. Intellectualism with street cred.
No wonder What Would Google Do-author Jeff Jarvis (a skeptical German newspaper called his thoughts “radical but not always sound” – ha!) was in his element. In his keynote – “Privacy, Publicness, and Penises“ – he elaborated on the “German Paradox,” wondering how a society that embraces mixed-gender saunas (and titles such as the one of his talk), even given all historical reasons, is still so utterly fixated on the defense of privacy on the web (going after Facebook and Google Street View; enabling convicted killers to expunge their names from Wikipedia; vehemently objecting to airport body scanners, etc.). In his eyes, “the issue is not privacy but control: We have a right to control our information and how it’s used. But all this talk about privacy could make us withhold more than ever; it could make us downright antisocial.” He argues that a collective revealing, with transparency as the norm, is the prerequisite of value creation: “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.” Value comes from sharing. It is not privacy, it is the public we must defend.
Of course, Jarvis, the Google fan boy, is way too smart to overlook the Achilles’ heel of his argumentation: Yes, the issue is control, not privacy, but how much privacy is there left to control if Google – granted, as the big enabler of publicness – owns our data? Thus, the big question for Jarvis and the rest of us is not so much “What Would Google Do?” but “What Will Google Do” (with all our data)?
My own talk, as part of a session titled “Innovators by the Fire,” was more mundane. Asked to illustrate the transformational power of design, I shared ten deliberately critical observations, insights, provocations, and questions on innovation, citing cases from the inevitable Apple (which just ranked again at the top of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 50 Most Innovative Companies) to Cirque du Soleil. I defended the thinking behind design thinking while arguing against its all-too-catchy "magic formula," and linked disruptive product innovation to viral marketing (more on that in another post soon).
What I was not aware of on stage was the irony of the moment. As I was talking about disruptive innovation, the real-time world had, just minutes before, plotted a disruption of historic proportions, a highly original twist that overshadowed the digital landscape, quite literally, with a very physical cloud. In fact, the volcano eruption in Iceland made the conference theme – “NowHere” – appear more timely than intended. With the air traffic over Europe coming to an abrupt halt and thousands of travelers stranded, the vision of “anytime, anywhere” suddenly seemed nostalgic. No one was going anywhere anymore. At least, the digerati, limited in their usual nomadism and stuck at airports all over Europe, gave Cloud Computing a new creative dimension, coming up with “ashtags” and other memorabilia proving that humor indeed means laughting in the face of the catastrophe – which is all the more valuable, to Jarvis’ point, if it’s shared to mutual comfort.
Strange days – but that’s why we’re here for anyway, no?
Here's my deck:
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